What makes Wagnitz angry is that he thinks Josie’s condition was avoidable. In fact, he thinks she was poisoned.

After Josie was diagnosed at age 3, Wagnitz tried to find out everything he could about autism disorder, the cause of which is unknown. About a year and a half ago, Wagnitz was asked by an acquaintance whether he had heard a supposed link between autism and childhood vaccines. Wagnitz, a toxilogist, began checking out the theory.

Starting at birth, Josie got the standard battery of vaccination kids receive before they start school. Some of these vaccines contained thimerosal, a preservative that is 50% mercury.

In July 1999, the US Food and Drug Administration asked drug manufacturers to stop using thimerosal in vaccines as a precaution. The use of thimerosal was subsequently phased out for most vaccines, but Wagnitz says the damage has been done.

Currently the Centers for Disease Control’s schedule of routine vaccination calls for children to receive 25 injected doses for eight vaccines, up to age 6. By estimates, when a child received all his childhood vaccinations, he was dosed with 125 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s allowable level for mercury exposure.

“Basically, all new autism cases are regressive. It means that when you reach a certain age you start going backward! They expect us to buy this? That all of a sudden this 3 year old loses her ability to talk? You’re supposed to believe this is a natural occurence?”

At age 2, Josie had two seizures. Extensize tests revealed nothing. A year later, a neurologist diagnosed Josie as having PDD-NOS, a condition somewhere in the middle of the autism spectrum.

“There’s so many diagnoses for unexplained childhood neurological disorders, you can’t even count them all. That’s the way they fool people. They just keep giving new names based on symptoms. But they cannot come up with a cause for any of disease.”

Some experts think that autism is genetic disorder, as evidenced by the fact that identical twins are usually similarly affected. But it still doesn’t explained why the cases have skyrocketed.

No published study really proves a link between autism and thimerosal, and Wagnitz mentions two recent studies that reach contrary conclusion. But these studies has gotten funding from pharmaceutical companies, including vaccine manufacturers. Which really questions the study’s findings.

Wagnitz knows that he’s up against big forces-pharmaceutical companies and the federal government-and this makes him feel more isolated. “This administration is going to do everything it can protect (drug manufacturers), even at the expense of these families that have been devastated, these innocent kids.”